There is an abundant literature in HCI on quantifying walking, that is, walking performed as a measurable activity in terms of number of steps, calories burned, or miles or kilometers walked.
Similarly, the “quantified self” community (see Parviainen, 2016) is interested in generating numerical data from their physical activities, from food intake to waste and energy consumption.
The obsession with numbers and quantitative measures has led to some discussion on an increasing commodification of walking, ultimately leading people to forget what it feels like to walk (e.g., Julian van Remoortere, cited in Amato, 2004). In the following, we suggest first a representational strategy that speaks of the importance of taking walking seriously. Second, we emphasize how our reflections in the paper may provide a groundwork for “walking for design”
as a methodological implication for design.
Vitality in Walking Research and in Design Practice
We started this paper by asking the reader to take of her/his shoes and socks, maybe to take a short walk. Hopefully, this experience briefly allowed the reader to sense with her/his feet and perhaps reflect on how the ground felt. It might have felt uncomfortable or peculiar but perhaps also liberating. Our intention was to show what happens if we as researchers strive to
preserve the aliveness of research, literally grounding research on walking in our (and the reader’s) own experience. Vannini suggested that,
non-representational research renders the liveliness of everyday interaction through methodological strategies that animate, rather than deaden, the qualities of the relation among people, objects, organic matter, animals, and their natural and built environments.
In other words, non-representational ethnographies aim to be as full of vitality as the lifeworlds they endeavor to enact. (2015, p. 4)
Obviously, taking off one’s shoes and socks is not a sufficient tactic for researchers or designers who want to engage with the choreographies of walking and digital technology.
However, the attempt toward a more sensuous and embodied participation in life as it unfolds on foot should remind us—as researchers and ordinary humans—that there is more to walking than getting from Point A to Point B. Walking is about more than just ordered movement. It is more than facilitating the ergonomics of putting one foot in front of the other.
Preserving the vital qualities of walking is, we believe, key to a genuine engagement with walking and emergent ways of walking as a hybrid digital practice and as a felt experience.
Vitality in representation attempts to avoid gross abstractions and might replace textual work with methods that concretely evoke such experiential qualities. This, in turn, can be turned into insights for design.
Designing for Walking, Walking for Design
Using strategies inspired by non-representational (or more-than representational; Lorimer, 2005) theory for relating what walking is and what walking can be opens up for a more alive form of scholarship. We find these strategies useful for framing design problems and design activities where precise and unambiguous representations of embodied practices might not necessarily be warranted.
We technology designers need to better understand how technology like mobile phones and wearable devices may subtly or grossly alter bodily ways of being and moving in the world, raising multiple questions. How are the movements of a walker’s body synchronized with other walkers? How are we walkers following internal and external rhythms of our bodily movements and the environment around us? How do we feel the sense of wear, accomplishment, and pride but also the slight shocks and ensuing stiffening of muscles brought on by the distractions from virtual layers of connectivity? How do we share stories of our movements around on foot? How do we sense and act on and in the landscape as we walk? How might digital technologies afford us a sense of embodied fluency but also contribute to mishaps or disaster? Perhaps we misstep as we search for digital infrastructures or walk along with our eyes fixed on the small screen in our hands. How do we appropriate technologies into walking? How do we wear it, protect it from mishaps, stay in rhythm with the device (or vice versa) and other device users, or share our digital footprints mindfully, become creative, and integrate digital technologies gracefully into walking practices?
In this paper we have used our own examples from walking and tried to inspire designers to record, reflect on, and generally take their walking seriously as means of framing their interventions and design practices. There are a number of vocabularies describing the specific qualities of interactive artifacts (e.g., Isbister & Höök, 2009; Moen, 2005) that are useful in
considering the many questions and issues raised in this paper. However, our goal in this paper is aimed at shifting the focus towards some basic qualities of walking as a ubiquitous and mundane form of human mobility that increasingly provides the context for using mobile computing. Therefore, we have developed a partial vocabulary of six characteristics with which to engage with qualities of pedestrian mobility: sensuality; rhythm, synchrony, and balance;
coincidence and narrative; hybridity; ecology of connection; and creativity.
We believe that designing for mobility, wearability, or walkability can usefully be improved by walking for design. Designers of mobile technology should walk more. Paying attention to the detailed variety and sensuous nature of walking practices is useful and relevant to design. Dix’s work (Dix, 2013; or walking, as recounted above) stands out as a particularly sustained engagement with walking practices and technologies. In this paper we have complemented some aspects of Dix’s walk (or work) with an initial and open vocabulary for talking about qualities of walking.
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Authors’ Note
Dr. Chamberlain’s input into this research was supported through the following EPSRC projects: Living with Digital Ubiquity (EP/M000877/1) and Fusing Semantic and Audio Technologies for Intelligent Music Production and Consumption (EP/L019981/1)..
All correspondence should be addressed to Parisa Eslambolchilar
Computer Science Department Swansea University
Singleton Park
Swansea, SA2 8PP, UK
p.eslambolchilar@swansea.ac.uk
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